Fiona Frybush is tired of the rat race, so she joins the Blue Moon Temple of the Sun, a cult headquartered in Greasy Corner, Arkansas. She gives up all of her possessions and lives in a big house with the group. Fiona's husband Ed is beside himself and hires a deprogrammer to get Fiona back. The deprogrammer tries to grab Fiona as she is leaving the local grocery store but Fiona, thinking he is trying to kill her, swings around with a large jar of peas and hits him over the head. The deprogrammer dies from his injuries.

 

The law firm where I work is defending Fiona in a criminal case. My supervising attorney wants me to locate on point cases for two proposed defenses, self-defense and insanity, so that Fiona is well prepared to present her case to a judge. Doris Rachles asked me to draft a memorandum of law citing one case on self-defense and one case on the insanity defense to support our client's two possible defenses. In the memo, outline the important findings and outcomes. Here is my memo format.

• FACTS - Facts of our case
• ISSUES - The issues I am researching are:
  • Whether self-defense will work in Fiona's case?
  • Whether the insanity defense will work in Fiona's case?
• CONCLUSIONS - A short conclusion as to how the court will rule on the issues.
• DISCUSSION - This is where I take the rule of law from the two precedent cases you find (one on insanity and one on self-defense) and apply it to the fact pattern. If the facts of the precedent case match up to the facts of our case, then I can conclude that the judge will rule the same way in our case as he/she did in the precedent case.
• SUMMARY - Bottom line - Briefly answer the questions as to which defense(s) will work in this case and why?